Top Rationalization Quotes

Favorite Rationalization Quotes

1. "Carmen hated the 'life is too short" rationalization. She thought it was one of the lamer excuses in the history of excuse-making. Whenever you did something because "life is too short not to," you could be sure life would be just long enough to punish you for it."Author: Ann Brashares

2. "The act of gaining true insights from self - reflection is a futile action for most ... as there are easy way out things like self justification, rationalization, delusions and denial which keeps us away from our true self, the inner core and thus we live contented"Author: Anubhav Mishra

4. "Some are filled with a compelling urge, a temptation that recycles in the mind, perhaps to become a habit, then an addiction. We are prone to some transgression and sin and also a rationalization that we have no guilt because we were born that way. We become trapped, and hence comes the pain and torment that only the Savior can heal. You have the power to stop and to be redeemed."Author: Boyd K. Packer

5. "When we look at Abraham, Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael, we see that God's grace can survive our three-ring-circuses of compromise, rationalization and weak faith."Author: Carl Prude Jr.

6. "To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning."Author: Christopher Hitchens

7. "The incommensurability between the modern economic system and the people who staff it explains why modern workers have so often been depicted as 'cogs' in the larger 'machinery' of industrial civilization; for while the practical rationalization of enterprise does require workers to be consistent, predictable, precise, uniform, and even to a certain extent creative, it does not really require them to be persons, that is, to live examined lives, to grow, to develop character, to search for truth, to know themselves, etc."Author: Craig M. Gay

8. "Dishonesty is all about the small acts we can take and then think, 'No, this not real cheating.' So if you think that the main mechanism is rationalization, then what you come up with, and that's what we find, is that we're basically trying to balance feeling good about ourselves."Author: Dan Ariely

9. "Our emotional mind will harness the rational mind to its purposes, for our feelings and reactions-- rationalizations-- justifying them in terms of the present moment, without realizing the influence of our emotional memory."Author: Daniel Goleman

10. "Through Nic's drug addiction, I have learned that parents can bear almost anything....I shock myself with my ability to rationalize and tolerate things once unthinkable. The rationalizations escalate....It's only marijuana. He gets high only on weekends. At least he's not using hard drugs...."Author: David Sheff

12. "God gave us minds to think with and hearts to thank with. Instead we use our hearts to think about the world as we would like it to have been, and we use our minds to come up with rationalizations for our ingratitude. We are a murmuring, discontented, unhappy, ungrateful people. And because we think we want salvation from our discontents..."Author: Douglas Wilson

13. "To be clever in argument is not rationality but rationalization."Author: Eliezer Yudkowsky

14. "Then you get the wrong answer and you can't go to the Moon that way! Nature isn't a person, you can't trick them into believing something else, if you try to tell the Moon it's made of cheese you can argue for days and it won't change the Moon! What you're talking about is rationalization, like starting with a sheet of paper, moving straight down to the bottom line, using ink to write 'and therefore, the Moon is made of cheese', and then moving back up to write all sorts of clever arguments above. But either the Moon is made of cheese or it isn't. The moment you wrote the bottom line, it was already true or already false. Whether or not the whole sheet of paper ends up with the right conclusion or the wrong conclusion is fixed the instant you write down the bottom line."Author: Eliezer Yudkowsky

15. "There is a collision course between the greed and rationalizations of the West and the force of nature; science and the planet are the casualties."Author: Eric Mann

16. "...Today the lack of faith is an expression of profound confusion and despair. Once skepticism and rationalism were progressive forces for the development of thought; now they have become rationalizations for relativism and uncertainty."Author: Erich Fromm

17. "Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit."Author: Freda Adler

18. "I write because I admire the act of rationalization, of seeking clarity in one's understanding of the complexities of life, and I'm bad at it. I'm slow. Writing, which is an arduous and slow process, proceeds at the same rate as my sloth-like mind."Author: Gregory Maguire

19. "Great rationalizations. All of which her adrenal gland middle-fingered and then carried right on."Author: J.R. Ward

20. "You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use."Author: Jane Jacobs

21. "You cling so tightly to your purity, my lad! How terrified you are of sullying your hands. Well, go ahead then, stay pure! What good will it do, and why even bother coming here among us? Purity is a concept of fakirs and friars. But you, the intellectuals, the bourgeois anarchists, you invoke purity as your rationalization for doing nothing. Do nothing, don't move, wrap your arms tight around your body, put on your gloves. As for myself, my handsare dirty. I have plunged my arms up to the elbows in excrement and blood. And what else should one do? Do you suppose that it is possible to governinnocently?"Author: Jean Paul Sartre

22. "People never mean to do thingd that are hurtful, yet sometimes it just happens, through an intense moment, through brief rationalization, or by simply speaking words that only belong inside one's head."Author: Jessica Sorensen

23. "The endless, agonizing recycling of what might have been, soon followed by a litany of rationalizations and self-deceptions as you struggle to reconcile the void between the person you want to be and the person you fear you are.."Author: Jon Krakauer

24. "I don't think because I hang out with enough black people, I'm gonna turn black. What kind of rationalization is that? I'm just friends with people that I like. I don't care what skin color you are."Author: Khloe Kardashian

25. "We attribute to ourselves qualities that we do not possess because if we possessed them, our lives would exactly mirror our image of ourselves. Our lies about what is really happening in our lives are what we use to "patch up" our ego with rationalizations and justifications, all of which conceal from us the fact that we cannot really do anything because we have no Being."Author: Laura Knight Jadczyk

26. "But I cheered myself up slightly with the rationalization that all new relationships - even the fictional ones - have obstacles to overcome in the beginning. I would not give up hope on this one. Not yet."Author: Lauren Weisberger

27. "Of course, that rationalization didn't work at all. It would have helped if I'd had some Oreo cookie ice cream to eat that the same time. I've learned that self-delusion is much easier when there's something sweet in your mouth."Author: Lee Goldberg

28. "The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors."Author: Max Lerner

29. "The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world."Author: Max Weber

30. "Well, in a world where so few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to choose to do so is to lodge a protest against specialization—against the total rationalization of life. Against the infiltration of commercial interests into every last cranny of our lives. To cook for the pleasure of it, to devote a portion of our leisure to it, is to declare our independence from the corporations seeking to organize our every waking moment into yet another occasion for consumption. (Come to think of it, our nonwaking moments as well: Ambien, anyone?) It is to reject the debilitating notion that, at least while we're at home, production is work best done by someone else, and the only legitimate form of leisure is consumption. This dependence marketers call "freedom."Author: Michael Pollan

31. "I didn't know that empty rationalization was part of your programming," said Ram. "We would not be fit companions for human beings without it."Author: Orson Scott Card

32. "Many of the religious apologists out there are not stupid people, they are often brilliant. People working in the field of theology and philosphy smart people everywhere. What they are those religious apologists are smart poeple who can build these amazingly intricate rationalizations for whatever weird practice they favor. Whether it's ritual cannibalism, or praying to spirits, or treating women as chattel. And they always building this on terrible shaky foundation of false premises."Author: P.Z. Myers

33. "Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our lives. Our powers of rationalization are unlimited. They allow us to live in luxury and indifference while others, whom we could help if we chose to, starve and go to hell."Author: Randy Alcorn

34. "Did the true, umbilical love that bound people together for the length of their lives require a certain intellectual dislocution in order to push past our insistent rationalization and enter the rough, uneven space inside our hearts?"Author: Reif Larsen

35. "And the Savior said that the very elect would be deceived by Lucifer if it were possible [see Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:22]. [Lucifer] will use his logic to confuse and his rationalizations to destroy. He will shade meanings, open doors an inch at a time, and lead from purest white through all the shades of gray to the darkest black."Author: Spencer W. Kimball

36. "We think of ourselves as failures, rather than renounce our belief in the possibility of perfection. We hang on to the hope of eternal love by denying even its temporary validity. It´s less painful to think 'I'm shallow', 'She's self centred', 'We couldn't communicate', 'It was all just physical', than to accept the simple fact that love is a passing sensation, for reasons beyond our control and even beyond our personalities. But who can reassure himself with his own rationalizations? No argument can fill the void of a dead feeling -- that reminder of the ultimate void, our final inconstancy. We're untrue even to life."Author: Stephen Vizinczey

37. "Questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations." - Steven Novella"Author: Steven Novella

38. "That we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical value of an assault by images. It is not a defect that we are not seared, that we do not suffer enough, when we see these images. Neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and frames. Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? All this, with the understanding that moral indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action."Author: Susan Sontag

39. "Prayer does not blind us to the world, but it transforms our vision of the world, and makes us see it, all men, and all the history of mankind, in the light of God. To pray 'in spirit and in truth' enables us to enter into contact with that infinite love, that inscrutable freedom which is at work behind the complexities and the intricacies of human existence. This does not mean fabricating for ourselves pious rationalizations to explain everything that happens. It involves no surreptitious manipulation of the hard truths of life."Author: Thomas Merton

40. "Paranoia is transmissible from mind to mind, but it does not go by the route of reason. It can therefore change its rationalization while remaining essentially the same."Author: William Nicholls

Rationalization Quotes Pictures

Today's Quote

For good-intentioned people making decisions, there's no such thing as a bad choice. So it doesn't matter what you choose. Choose something, then deliberately line up with the choice you make. This is the art of alignment and allowing. (paraphrased)" Author: Abraham Hicks